AFPM, API partner on Advancing Process Safety Program

Safety

AFPM and API have recently partnered to create the Advancing Process Safety (APS) program, which aims to enhance process safety throughout industry by facilitating education, communication and collaboration across countless companies and organizations. The ultimate goal of the initiative is to drive process safety incidents down to zero in the near future.

"Process safety affects every one of us every day. It's part of all of our jobs," said Dan Wilczynski, corporate process safety coordinator, Marathon Petroleum Corp. "The only way to tackle process safety and get it under control is that we all work together, so the Advancing Process Safety program is our way of doing that.

"The philosophy is that it's everyone's best interest to improve process safety across the industry because one incident affects us all. I came from the nuclear power industry and lived through a serious event that was much like Three Mile Island, except that a couple operators literally saved the day, and I can tell you that the nuclear industry was seriously affected â¦ and we all recognize that process safety incidents can seriously impact our industry as well."

Wilczynski stressed a reduction in the frequency and consequences of process safety events hinges on collaboration and collectively leveraging industry knowledge, explaining the APS program as "a way of letting companies bring their good practices into the program and make them available to other operating companies."

"The industry learning comes from two different sets," Wilczynski explained at the AFPM Reliability & Maintenance Conference and Exhibition held recently in San Antonio. "One is a collection of process safety event data we collect on an annual basis to really show how good we're getting and how much room there is to improve and to learn from each of those events. And then there's a separate event sharing program where we get even more information on each of those events and make that available to members."

Other features of the program Wilczynski highlighted include separate branches focused on human reliability and mechanical integrity, as well as regionally located faceto- face meetings and site evaluations.

"We have a lot of good, organic conversations that happen where someone brings something forward, and that cascades up into the organization," added Steve Mason, OEMS, program leader, HollyFrontier. "We talk about whether this could happen at your site. What protections do you have in place to prevent against some of these things?

"The site assessments where you have all of this expertise -- they're gathering data and understanding the trends in terms of what our weak points are as an industry and what we need to focus on to help improve those weak points."

The APS program also disseminates safety bulletins to synthesize any trends identified in its collected data for more manageable consumption.

"Emerging topics are opportunities for us," Mason stated. "How do we engage? How do we get the person to do the right thing at the right time, have the right tools, have the right information?"

One answer to this question, Mason offered, is the ASP program's Walk the Line initiative, a practice-sharing portal that provides a variety of tools to industry to help ensure operators know with 100-percent certainty where energy will flow between two points in a process.

"[Looking at] a five-year trend, it looks good," Mason said. "That doesn't mean we're done. But in general, things are moving in the right direction. Part of that is just simply awareness. When you start tracking, people become much more aware of what a Tier 1 and Tier 2 event are and a lot more sensitive to that."

But despite all the safety awareness efforts already undertaken in industry today, Mason shared, 62 percent of process safety incidents are still traceable to human error. "That kind of prompted the initiatives we have for Walk the Line," he explained. "We even have a special category of the events we have in our database overall; about a third of them we categorize as Walk the Line. If someone would have walked the line and verified the condition of the equipment before we put product in it, we wouldn't have had the incident. That's part of our challenge."